Women, War and Letters, 1880-1920

Proposals are invited for a two-day literary conference titled
Behind the
Lines: Women, War and Letters, 1880-1920, organised as part of a research
cluster within the University of Limerick and NUI Galway Gender ARC. The
conference will be held at the University of Limerick.

The aim of this conference is to interrogate the literary tropes and political
constructions through which women’s writing conceptualises conflict. In Ireland,
to engage with national politics and national conflicts in the period between
the Land War and partition was to find oneself grappling with gendered norms and
expectations, through which distinctive modes of patriotic action could be
validated or naturalised, but also re-interpreted or condemned. At the same
time, in an international context, imperial and colonial conflicts of the late
nineteenth-century opened up new conceptions of space and national identity,
while in the early twentieth century the First World War produced a sustained
literary re-evaluation of cultures of militarisms and masculinity. These
political events were, however, taking place alongside a series of other
conflicts, conflicts centred around disruptions of norms of gendered behaviour
and class alignments, as well as disruptions of literary norms with the rise of
Modernism. What meanings accrue to these colliding agendas, needs, and
practices? How can we discover them?